Heavy-quark deep-inelastic scattering with a running mass

TL;DR

This paper introduces the use of a running mass scheme in perturbative QCD calculations of heavy-quark production in deep-inelastic scattering, leading to improved theoretical stability and a precise charm-quark mass determination.

Contribution

It is the first to employ the MSbar running mass scheme for charm and bottom production in deep-inelastic scattering, enhancing perturbative stability and reducing uncertainties.

Findings

Improved stability of perturbative expansion.

Reduced theoretical uncertainties.

Precise charm-quark mass measurement: m_c(m_c) = 1.01 ± 0.09 (exp) ± 0.03 (th) GeV.

Abstract

We study the production of heavy quarks in deep-inelastic scattering within perturbative QCD. As a novelty, we employ for the first time the running mass definition in the MSbar scheme for deep-inelastic charm and bottom production. We observe an improved stability of the perturbative expansion and a reduced theoretical uncertainty due to variations of the renormalization and factorization scales. As our best estimate we extract from a global fit to fixed-target and HERA collider data for the charm-quark an MSbar mass of m_c(m_c) = 1.01 +- 0.09 (exp) +- 0.03 (th) GeV.